Tag Archives: bernie sanders

Krugman Triples Down on His Smear of Friedman and Bernie

Posted on February 22, 2016 by | 18 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19.

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged , ,

Jamie Galbraith’s Letter to Former CEA Chairs

Posted on February 21, 2016 by | 5 comments

Jamie Galbraith has written an excellent letter to the four former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and Obama regarding their letter to Professor Gerald Friedman and Senator Bernie Sanders. The full text is below.

Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

Wall Street Declares War on Bernie Sanders

Posted on January 25, 2016 by | 20 comments

By William K. Black

Wall Street billionaires are freaking out about the chance that Bernie Sanders could be elected President.  Stephen Schwarzman, one of the wealthiest and most odious people in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that one of the three principal causes of the recent global financial trauma was “the market’s” fear that Sanders may be elected President.  Schwarzman is infamous for ranting that President Obama’s proposals to end the “carried interest” tax scam that allows private equity billionaires like Schwarzman to pay lower income tax rates than their secretaries was “like when Hitler invaded Poland.”

Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged , , ,

MMT and Bernie Sanders

Posted on November 20, 2015 by | 7 comments

L. Randall Wray

Yesterday Senator Bernie Sanders gave an important speech in which he invoked President Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights” in defense of his platform. As Bernie rightly pointed out, all of Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs to which we have become accustomed, were tagged as “socialism”—just as pundits are branding Bernie’s proposals as dangerous socialist ideas. You can see Bernie’s prepared remarks here.

Just before Bernie’s speech, I was asked to do an interview with Alex Jensen, on TBS eFM’s “This Morning” English radio program in Seoul, Korea. I was sent a list of questions and jotted down very brief responses. Unfortunately, in our radio interview we were only able to get through a few of these. You can listen to the interview (uses iTunes) here. My interview is #8, Name: 1119 Issue Today with Professor L.R. Wray

Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in L. Randall Wray

Tagged , ,

Fiscal Myths of Campaign 2016: A New Kindle e-Book

Posted on October 23, 2015 by | 1 comment

Most of the world, and most notably the United States, is in the grip of fiscal myths fostered by the ideology of neoliberalism. There is virtual unanimity across the major political parties in the United States in accepting the viewpoint of neoliberalism, and the fiscal myths associated with it.

This book is about these myths, the arguments showing that they are, indeed, myths, and the truths that can counter them. It is about Campaign 2016, and some of its issues, because the fiscal myths will certainly be used in the Campaign; since, for the first time in a very long time, there is a major party candidate running, who, because he advocates for a very broad agenda and for fighting inequality, will, sooner or later, find that some, and perhaps a large number, of fiscal myths are being directed at him by his opponents and their supporters, who want to persuade voters that his agenda is “fiscally irresponsible.”

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda

Posted on August 17, 2015 by | 24 comments

By Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Discussions of the ‘politically possible’ always remind me of a favorite quote: “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”

Bernie Sanders’ issues page reads like a list of everything we’ve been told is not politically possible.  And yet he’s getting record breaking support, precisely because people are tired of being told that something cannot be done–that it is impossible to get money out of politics, or that tackling inequality and racial injustice is unrealistic, or that securing a living wage is a political nonstarter.

Bernie has unapologetically rejected sclerotic visions of what is ‘politically possible’.  And now he should add the Job Guarantee (JG) to his list of issues. Indeed, he already has the key ingredients—a bold proposal to eliminate unemployment by creating 13 million decent-paying jobs, a living wage, and a federally-funded youth job guarantee, which Sandy Darity correctly called a stepping stone (a pilot program) to a blanket job guarantee for all.

Continue reading →

24 Comments

Posted in Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Tagged , ,

Is Progressivism in the Eye of the Beholder?

Posted on May 28, 2015 by | 6 comments

Thomas Palley recently blogged a post that was cross-posted at Naked Capitalism where I read it. In it, he discussed the question of whether Hillary Clinton’s apparent intention to run as a progressive in 2016 represents a sincere change in her views, or whether it is just a political communications strategy to please the progressive base of the Democratic Party.

In his analysis, Palley points to Clinton’s failure to answer questions of journalists and to be pinned down to specifics on policy questions. He also points to the fact that the economic advisers who are central to Clintonworld still include Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Peter Orszag, and, I think, he reasonably could have added Gene Sperling and Jack Lew, who are still serving President Obama, but who were two of Bill Clinton’s mainstays. These economists, and others associated with the Clintons had a hand in all the economic policy failures of the past 20 years, and continues with this money quote: Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Will We Ever Get Change if We Keep Electing People Who Represent Special Interests?

Posted on March 5, 2015 by | 4 comments

We can see the positioning and the messaging on the Democratic side beginning to take shape for the 2016 elections. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with nods to Thomas Piketty and various economists have stepped forward to offer the themes of salvation for the middle class, moderating the extremes of inequality in American society, and doing something real about jobs and wages.

Clinton World seems to be responding, not yet with forthright statements from Hillary Clinton, but recently with articles by stalwarts of neoliberal Clintonism (and veterans of the Obama Administration) such as Larry Summers and Peter Orszag, expressing concerns about inequality and proposing measures to alleviate it, even including increased taxation on the wealthy.

Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Return of the Coin?

Posted on February 13, 2015 by | 8 comments

By Joe Firestone

The last few weeks have seen at least two posts calling attention to the potential use of the platinum coin in America’s political economy. The first to appear was Rob Urie’s piece in Counterpunch provocatively titled: “The Trillion Dollar Catshit Coin” And the second was Mike Sandler’s post in The Huffington Post called “Greece and the U.S. Senate: Economics for the 99%.

Let’s begin looking at these with Sandler’s effort. He reports on two challenges to austerity. The first is from Syriza’s victory in Greece and its promise to Greek voters that it will end austerity. The second:

The austerity mindset faces a new foe in the U.S. Senate as well. The re-shuffle of the last U.S. election that put austerity-minded Republicans in power has ironically resulted in a new anti-austerity economist being hired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Senate Budget Committee — Professor Stephanie Kelton of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Professor Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a very pro-stimulus economic approach. Her hiring represents the biggest step forward for MMT, since the PR coup of the Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin in 2013. At that time, Kelton reportedly created the #mintthecoin hashtag that was featured in columns by Paul Krugman and others.

Sanders’ hiring of Kelton is a break from the more conciliatory “balanced budgeting” approach of some Democrats, such as former treasury secretaries with ties to Wall Street and fiscally-conservative “deficit hawks.” Kelton and her MMT colleagues go beyond the traditional Keynesian stimulus of short-term deficit spending. They seek to unleash the power of monetary policy to circumvent the scarcity mindset imposed on government action, perhaps even bringing the Trillion Dollar Coin back into the discussion.

Of course, Sandler means to say fiscal policy in the above, since MMT economics greatly favors reliance on fiscal, rather than monetary policy, in spite of the “monetary” in its name. But apart from that, he projects that we may see the platinum coin come back into prominence soon. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Senator Bernie Sanders presents Tcherneva’s research to Show How Reagan Helped Destroy the Middle Class

Posted on February 1, 2015 by | 13 comments

By Michael McAuliff
(cross posted from Huff Post)

WASHINGTON — President Ronald Reagan remains a venerated figure in American politics, even as folks on the left have been taking a more critical look at his economic legacy in recent years.

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders would not think well of the Gipper. But when Sanders took to the Senate floor Thursday evening to offer a broad vision for how to do something to help the declining middle class, he offered a stunning chart that showed just how poorly most Americans have fared during economic recoveries since the advent of Reaganomics.

The chart starts by showing that in the decades after World War II, the bottom 90 percent of the country captured most of the growth in income during rebounds from tough times. But then came the Reagan era, and what George H. W. Bush once dubbed “voodoo economics.” After Reagan implemented his policies, the top 10 percent grabbed nearly 80 percent of the growth in incomes coming out of the oil crises of the late ‘70s.

Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Guest Blogger

Tagged , , , ,